Customer-friendly comic shops

I read this article today, in part about woman-friendly comic shops, how they are and how they aren't.

Naturally, this made me think of something slightly different.

The last time I was in a comic shop, several months ago, I was pleased and suprised to see that we (the husband, the eight-year-old, the then-twelve-year-old, and me) weren't the only family in there. There was another couple with three kids, two boys and a girl, somewhere between six and ten years old. They were looking at the superhero titles, just as mine were. (None were looking at the kid-specific rack with all the Marvel Adventures and cartoon-based DCs, but that was at the front of the shop and they had probably looked it over when they came in, as we had, and moved on.)

The shop was fairly clean, spacious, and well ventilated. The longboxes were on tables in the center of the room, with the new comics on display in the back. There were a few posters, and the windows were painted (Green Lantern, yay!) We don't much care if a store is fancy as long as it has what we want.

In fact, a lot of the time when we went into a shop (we don't have any locally, so if we're out of town we often visit a few), I got the sense that my girls were the only kids they'd seen all day. Sometimes someone offered to help us find what we wanted, but honestly, if I look like I know what I'm doing, I'm happier if sales clerks just leave me alone (please don't hover!). Sometimes someone gave the girls some leftover Free Comic Day books, which is nice and all, but almost never anything they actually want. One store owner was particularly nice about helping find things that the kids would like--as in, he asked who they liked and found something kid-appropriate featuring that character (Storm, in this case).

Because kid-friendly doesn't have to mean kid-oriented.

(Although I suppose that that any store featuring comic books and action figures is sort of kid-oriented by definition. :))

Kid-friendly just has to mean not hostile to kids. It has to mean that kid customers are treated as customers.

I suppose the same is basically true of female-friendly shops?

So, the article says that

I'm sure that many women have sworn off comics rather than try to deal with buying them in a hostile environment....[but] Most mail order businesses that are easy to find and, for that matter, order from, don't carry the best books for female fans.

I'm not sure what "the best books for female fans" would be, but then I'm a long-term comic fan who prefers mainstream superhero titles. I'm guessing that I wouldn't find much to my taste in a comic store that catered specifically to women, although I think it would be very cool if such a thing existed. (I don't tend to go to women's book stores, either, but I have friends who love them--not only for the product content but for the atmosphere. A women's comic store would of course have a much smaller potential customer base, although I'd think that one could do well online.)

Comic shops do try to make a point of carrying "the best books for kid fans." They often keep them all together, sometimes away from the rest of the titles (whether to protect the kids or the other books, I don't know). But it's a market they don't want to ignore. And it's not just kids who buy the kid books--I know of plenty of adult comic fans who love the Marvel Adventures line--so I'd say it's a good marketing choice.

But back to the first shop. I don't know if there were any other women in the shop, apart from myself and the other mom. I didn't notice. I generally don't notice. We'd been to this shop before, and sometimes there's a woman working there, but she wasn't there that day if I recall correctly.

But I definitely notice when there were other kids there. Very cool, I thought, that here was another family enjoying the comic hobby together. You don't see that too often.